Browsing by Author "Lass, Roger"

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    Afrikaans-English in the Western Cape : a descriptive socio-linguistic investigation
    (1993) Watermeyer, Susan Jean; Lass, Roger; Mesthrie, Rajend
    I have attempted to give a broad description of the variety of English used by first-language (White) Afrikaans-speakers in the Western Cape. The first chapter outlines the aims of the thesis with respect to the study of English as a world phenomenon. Important work on other varieties of English, notably that of William Labov and that of Lesley Milroy, is discussed, with emphasis on variationist studies. The chapter also includes a description of the methods used for the collection of data. I did not use questionnaires but rather conducted 'participation interviews'. A brief outline of the areas that the informants were selected from is given. Chapters 2 and 3 give the historical and sociolinguistic background of the Afrikaners. This is important, as without an understanding of their history and social circumstances one cannot appreciate their present attitudes to language. The formative history of the Afrikaners includes a description of the policies of the British government at the Cape at the beginning of the nineteenth century and the subsequent emergence of national identity among the formerly Dutch community. The establishment of such organisations as the Afrikaner Bond, the Broederbond and the Ossewabrandwag all contributed to the identity of the Afrikaners today. The final section of chapter 3 deals with speech communities as well as the concept of social class, as applied to the White South African community. There is a brief outline of the differences between the White and Coloured Afrikaans-speaking communities of the Cape. The third section of this thesis (chapter 4) concerns language: acquisition, in particular theories of second language acquisition. I have outlined the development of (White) education in South Africa, with particular reference to medium of education, and have included a brief description of second language teaching in South Africa today. Bilingualism and ,communication strategies are discussed and I have grouped the informants according to their individual level of proficiency in English. The use of code-switching and code-mixing techniques is also discussed in this chapter, with a brief look at the structural differences between English and Afrikaans. The last, and major, part of the thesis, chapters 5 and 6, is a detailed description of the phonology, syntax, morphology and lexis of Afrikaans-English. The features of this variety are compared to those of standard South African English. The presence or absence of features in the speech of the informants is discussed and indicated in the tables given; the core features, i.e. those that are found even in the speech of the most fluent speakers, are noted. It is also shown that although all the features are possible, no single speaker will have the full set of variables in his/her speech. The presence of the features discussed in this section in Afrikaans- English, Coloured English and other, non-South African, varieties of English is shown; the presence of a feature in non-South African varieties of English appears to reinforce the use of that particular feature in Afrikaans-English. It is shown that Afrikaans-English overlaps phonologically with the continuum of first language South African English at either end of the spectrum on the one hand the accent of Afrikaans- English has features in common with Extreme South African English and at the other, LI-fluency end, it is almost indistinguishable from Respectable South African English. Mention is also made of syntactic, morphological and lexical features that spill over into LI varieties of South African English. Finally, I have appended a brief outline of each of the four competence groups and have given annotated extracts from the data for each. I have also included a collection of the comments regarding language made by the informants.
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    English and Afrikaans in District Six : a sociolinguistic study
    (1989) McCormick, Kay; Lass, Roger
    This is a descriptive study of the use of English and Afrikaans in Cape Town's District Six - a large inner-city neighbourhood, first settled in the 1840s and, by the implementation of a series of laws, depopulated and almost entirely razed during the 1970s. Each language has a history of having been both a lingua franca and a home language in that area. As lingua francas, both languages were used instrumentally by large numbers of people who had little or no concern with the promotion and preservation of the standard dialects of the languages as a part of maintaining their own identity in the multilingual, multicultural context of the city. The effects of this can be seen in contemporary vernacular English and Afrikaans which differ markedly from the standard dialects, and, it can be argued, show linguistic signs of this long period of language contact. The history of language contact was reconstructed through the use of primary and secondary written resources and oral history records. The distribution of socio-economic power and privilege has not been equal among speakers of the two languages in South Africa as a whole. The cross-currents of discrimination and oppression have affected contemporary attitudes towards the two languages and their dialects in complex ways, producing some clear patterns but also ambivalence and contradictions. This thesis examines those aspects of the history of English and Afrikaans in District Six which have a bearing on current attitudes, practices and dialect features in the segment of District which escaped demolition. Interviews and observation were used to investigate the effects of that history and of geographic and socio-economic factors on the linguistic repertoire of the remaining section of the community.
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    A history of the Bhojpuri (or "Hindi") language in South Africa
    (1985) Mesthrie, Rajend; Lass, Roger
    Although Indian languages have existed in South Africa for the last 125 years, there are no academic studies of any of them - of their use in South Africa, their evolution and current decline. Many misconceptions persist concerning their names, their structure, and status as 'proper' languages. This thesis deals with the history of one such language, Bhojpuri (more usually, but incorrectly, referred to as "Hindi"). I attempt to trace the origins of the South African variety of this language by examining the places of origin of the original indentured migrants who brought it to South Africa. A complex sociolinguistic picture emerges, since these immigrants came from a very wide area in North India spanning several languages. I also attempt to describe the early history of Bhojpuri in South Africa as a 'plantation' language. Subsequent changing patterns of usage are then detailed, including phonetic, syntactic, lexical and semantic change. The influence of other South African languages - chiefly English, but also Zulu, Fanagalo, and other Indian languages - is described in detail, as well as changes not directly attributable to language contact. A final section focusses on the decline of the language and the process of language death. From another (more international) perspective this study lays the foundation for comparisons between Bhojpuri in South Africa and other 'overseas' varieties of it, spawned under very similar conditions, in ex-colonies like Surinam, Fiji, Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad and others. Such a comparative study could well make as great a contribution to general and socio-linguistics as the study of creoles has in the recent past. Information concerning this unwritten language was gathered by field-work throughout Natal. This involved informal interviews with over two hundred fluent speakers, including four who had been born in India during the time of immigrations. The study also draws upon the author's observations on language practices as an 'inside' member of the community under study.
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    The invisible hand and sound change
    (2004) Sulik, J; Lass, Roger
    Includes bibliography.
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    Oral narratives of personal experience : a developmental sociolinguistic study of Cape Flats children
    (2000) Malan, Karen Cecile; Lass, Roger; Mesthrie, Rajend
    Bibliography: leaves 268-282.
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    A unity hypothesis for the southern African Khoesan languages
    (2009) Du Plessis, Menán; Mesthrie, Rajend; Lass, Roger
    The study demonstrates for the first time the probable genetic unity of the KHOE, JU and UJ -T AA groups of southern African Khoesan, by means of the first full-scale application of a conventional comparative approach. It is shown in the first stage that there are repeated cross-SAK resemblances in the morphology of those verbs most frequently enlisted for grammatical purposes in the context of multi-verb constructions; and that these languages furthermore display multiple similarities 'horizontally' across their specifier systems. where the resemblances are often also visible 'vertically', i.e. down the lists of possible exponents. These structural affinities are sufficiently thoroughgoing to warrant a working surmise that the SAK languages might be genetically related. In the second stage, cross-SAK comparative material from various sources is presented in the form of arrays. The tabulations reveal a range of repeating alternations involving the basic positional click types, with some associated patternings of the possible click 'accompaniments'. The fact that the alternations are iterated and do not necessarily involve identities makes it more likely, when combined with the weight of the structural evidence, that the items in the comparative series are inherited than borrowed.
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    Variation and standardisation : the case of Afrikaans (1880-1922)
    (1999) Deumert, Andrea; Lass, Roger
    Following the general model outlined in Weinreich, Labov & Herzog (1968), this study is a contribution to the historiography of Afrikaans from a variationist perspective, investigating the patterns of linguistic variability in the context of the early standardisation of Afrikaans. The work is based on a newly collected historical corpus of private documents which includes letters and diaries from 136 individuals (written between 1880 and 1922), and can be said to represent acrolectal and mesolectal usage. Several morphosyntactic, morpholexical and syntactic variables were investigated: loss of person and number distinctions in the present tense paradigm, loss of the infinitive, regularisation of the past participle, loss of the preterite, loss of gender, the emergence of a new system of adjective inflection and of a new pronoun system, the so-called 'double' negation, infinitive clauses, the use of objective vir, and the periphrastic possessive with se. The quantitative analysis of these variables makes use of a variety of methods: descriptive techniques such as distribution analysis, implicational scaling, cluster analysis, multidimensional scaling and principal components analysis, as well as inferential statistics such as the chi-square test. Variation is furthermore described from a code-switching perspective. As a study in historical sociolinguistics this dissertation is also concerned with the epistemological aspects of socio-historical research, in particular the role of speaker agency in historical explanations, the 'measurement' of the extralinguistic variables in sociolinguistic research, the nature of the relationship between sociolinguistic and social theory, and in general the ontological status of our explanatory and descriptive concepts and taxonomies. While traditionally historiographers of Afrikaans have argued that there existed a sharp linguistic and functional distinction between Afrikaans and Dutch from the mid 18th century, the patterns of variability described for the corpus indicate the existence of a complex dialect continuum (rather than diglossia) until the early 20th century. The results of the quantitative analysis suggest furthermore that the process of linguistic change was slower than hitherto assumed, and variation patterns described for the late 18th century were still found to exist in the corpus. Such continuities challenge the conventional dating of the emergence of Afrikaans as a new language or dialect (characterised by almost complete morphological regularisation and a cluster of innovative syntactic features) to around 1800. As regards the standardisation of Afrikaans the study shows that from the 1850s a relatively uniform model of what constituted the 'vernacular' (or ‘Afrikaans, as it came to be known) existed as a well-defined entity in the popular consciousness, while the actual language use of many speakers remained rather more variable. Increasingly, linguistic practices which were not in line with the propagated model of 'Afrikaans' were identified by the contemporary metalinguistic discourse (which was strongly marked by 19th century cultural nationalism) as unauthentic and thus undesirable. The diffusion of the new standard is shown to have followed the path typical for modern standard languages, i.e. via the socially (and geographically) mobile professional class or intelligentsia. After about 1914 the new standard was widely diffused, and had replaced other Netherlandic varieties in many private documents.